Your Tuesday Kickstarter: Tex Murphy - Project Fedora

For people with no interest in adventures, this Kickstarter revolution must be increasingly frustrating. Certainly there’s a decent smattering of RPGs in there too, but I always like to think of those as adventures with combat. For those who grew up playing adventures in the late 80s, early 90s however, this is like a mad dream. The latest beloved franchise to attempt a comeback is the Tex Murphy series, reincarnating the sardonic private eye in, well, just about exactly the same way he appeared nearly two decades ago.

Crucially, Tex himself, Chris Jones, is on board – being the designer you’d hope so. And as you’ll see from the video below, despite having added a few more crow’s feet, he’s still very much of the role.

$450,000 is a big ask – while the Tex Murphy games were extremely popular in the heyday of the CD-ROM, I’m not sure they’re as fondly remembered as the earlier Sierra games, or strikingly different LucasArts games. But I remember them fondly! I remember enjoying the deeply peculiar mix of noir fiction, science fiction, and nonsense, as well as being absolutely bewildered how it could be that I was controlling FMV characters.

The video suggests there’s no wrongfooted decision to move away from the corny. But I’m a little concerned both about the sparsity of information on the page – little effort has gone in outside of the lovely video – and by the really dreadful reward tiers. Not only are they incredibly slapdash and difficult to parse, but they’re not exactly enticing. Like, why put a PDF of a 16 year old novel in the $150 section? How about enticing people at more sensible lower prices with things that are literally free to distribute. And I’m increasingly unimpressed with games offering “beta test the game” at the higher tiers. Beta testing is something you pay people to do.

I’d really like to see this one happen. It’s already over $60,000 in the first day, so that’s a great start. I think they may want to introduce a few more tiers, however, and maybe put some effort into their Kickstarter page, pledge to Kick It Forward, etc.